Facebook exposes your posts to the world

Louisa Hearn

Facebook users may be in for a rude awakening this week following a revamp of privacy settings that prompts them to post their status updates and personal information directly to the internet for everyone to see.

The privacy overhaul, which is intended to give users more control over who sees the information they post on their personal pages, suggests users publish posts and personal information, such as work and education, to everyone, as the social networking company responds to competition from Twitter.

Facebook users will be presented with a transition tool that explains the changes and gives them an option to update their settings according to Facebook's recommendations, or to preserve their existing settings.

Facebook said the new controls, being rolling out this week, were designed to simplify the cumbersome privacy settings that have confounded many people - which is one reason that only 15 per cent to 20 per cent of Facebook users have specified their privacy settings.

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Facebook hopes people will now get comfortable sharing even more information as notifications on the site are made public across on the internet for the first time.

Privacy advocates still worry that users will expose too much about themselves, inadvertently or not. It remains to be seen whether the shift will mean fewer surprises for people who have unintentionally shared party photos with their bosses.

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“We'll be recommending that you make available to everyone a limited set of information that helps people find and connect with you, information like 'About Me' and where you work or go to school. For more sensitive information, like photos and videos in which you've been tagged and your phone number, we'll be recommending a more restrictive setting,” said Facebook product manager Ruchi Sanghyi.

As part of the changes, Facebook users will be able to select a privacy setting for each piece of content, such as photos or updates, that they share on the site - as they share it. The choices are "friends" only, "friends of friends" or "everyone", which means not just Facebook users but everyone on the internet. (The exception: minors won't be able to share their content with everyone. For people under 18, the "everyone" setting will send information to "friends of friends".)

There is also an option to customise groups of friends - such as "college buddies" - for certain kinds of updates.

Jules Polonetsky, co-chairman and director at the Future of Privacy Forum think tank in Washington, praised how this process resembles the way people decide what to share in their day-to-day lives. He said putting the controls "when you need it, right there, is far better than putting it in a 'privacy' or 'help' location" somewhere on the site.

Some privacy advocates said the overhaul would actually reduce the amount of control Facebook users have over personal data. Their lists of friends and pages they are fans of will now be easily viewable by the public, for instance.

That is troubling because "even something as seemingly innocuous as your list of friends can reveal a great deal about you", Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in a blog post. While it is still possible to hide your list of friends from the public, the setting is hard to find, which goes against Facebook's aim of simplifying the privacy settings, he noted.

"Facebook is nudging the settings toward the 'disclose everything' position. That's not fair from the privacy perspective," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Rotenberg said his organisation was evaluating Facebook's new privacy changes to see if they were deceptive.

"Let me put it this way, right now we're taking a lot of screenshots (of Facebook)," Rotenberg said, when asked if his group might file a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission.

Facebook is also getting rid of its geographic networks, because many of them - take "New York" or "Australia" - have become too big. There were 5.7 million people in the London network, for example.

If users were previously part of such a geographic network, this location will now be listed in their profiles under "current city".

Other networks, for schools and workplaces, are staying.

The changes have no effect on advertising on the site, said Elliot Schrage, vice-president of global communications and public policy at Facebook.

But he added that, by giving users such granular control over the content they share, Facebook is encouraging more sharing and a greater connection to the site.

"If users feel more confident with our service, they will use our service more," he said. "And the more they use our services the more benefits we derive."